a podcast about us and them

Ep 4. Broken Windows

Bugs, daylight savings time and park benches that poke you in the posterior if you sit on them too long: how are these related crime?

Fix the small things and the big ones will follow. That's the basic premise of Broken Windows Theory, which has inspired revolutions in public policy since it first appeared on the pages of The Atlantic in 1982. It may be mired in controversy, but it seems to work. But why?

In this episode of N of Us, I propose Broken Windows is the icing on our psychological bun, that there's something deeper in our psyche that turns us off the places where we are.